[Media-watch] FW: Studies in Hypocrisy: From the F-Word to the NYT and Mrs. Jellyby (forthcoming in Z)

[David Miller]

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Date: Wed, 12 Jan 2005 22:49:56 -0500
Subject: Studies in Hypocrisy: From the F-Word to the NYT and Mrs. Jellyby
(forthcoming in Z)

(Forthcoming in Z Magazine, February 2005)

 

Studies in Hypocrisy: From the F-Word to the New York Times and Mrs. Jellyby

 

                                          Edward S. Herman

 

The F-Word 

 

The hypocrisy that runs deep in this culture is amusingly illustrated by the
fact that while the F-word has become standard operating language,
especially under conditions of  emotion or stress, and for the political
right as well as others, for the rightwing base and many Republican cadres
and allies it is the ultimate in immoral and ³indecent² language, and its
use in the media is  fought with great energy. On the one hand we have
Vice-President Dick Cheney using the word on the floor of the Senate telling
Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, ³Fuck yourself²; and George  Bush himself
saying to Wall Street Journal journalist Al Hunt ³You no-good fucking son of
a bitch. I will never fucking forget what you wrote!² Karl Rove told Ron
Suskind his thoughts about one political enemy: ³We will fuck him. Do you
hear me? We will fuck him. Like no one else has ever fucked him.² And
rightwing judge  Laurence Silberman, exulting over an attack on Senator Paul
Simon who had harshly questioned the credentials of  Clarence Thomas for
Supreme Court justice, said: ³You  nailed him! You fucked him!²

 

It is also the word of choice among our boys fighting for freedom in Iraq:
³We¹re here to give you your fuckin freedom, so back off,² as one GI put it
to Iraqi protesters. And on-site reports of  GI sweeps and violent entry
into Iraqi homes regularly report ³fuck² as the word of choice by the
invaders as they beat and  push the terrified householders around.

 

Why the deep concern of the righteous? An important reason is that the word
is about SEX, which is bad and best treated by abstinence and (in later
years) darkness. The F-word¹s use might cause children to ask for an
explanation, which would force the righteous into evasions and talks about
stork-delivery, when they don¹t want to lie.

 

 FCC boss Michael Powell has responded to the push of the righteous, with
the FCC ruling in March 2004 ³that the use of the ŒF-word¹ during last
year¹s broadcast of the Golden Globes violates the federal statuteŠ.the
gratuitous use of such vulgar language on broadcast television will not be
tolerated.² 

 

This hypocrisy works out well for the rightwing as they dominate both the
media and the work of  an agency like the FCC. Thus the contradiction and
hypocrisy are not given much attention, and rules against indecency can be
used as a  selective club to keep the media in line.

 

Sex in the Media 

 

A closely related profusion of  hypocrisy flows from the fact that sex
sells, so that the commercial media, under competitive pressure, use it
aggressively in both ads and programming. Women are displayed in ever more
provocative clothing (or lack of it),  poses and actions. The competitive
ads for cures for erectile dysfunction and frigidity show couples looking
ever more satisfied from just-completed sexual encounters, and sex-saturated
programs like ³Married by America² and ³Desperate Housewives² have
proliferated, heavily represented on the Fox network.  Frank Rich notes that
³Fox remains the go-to network for Paris Hilton (ŒThe Simple Life¹) and
wife-swapping (ŒTrading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy¹),² and that ³The
Murdoch cultural stable includes recent books like Jenna Jameson¹s ŒHow to
Make Love Like a Porn Star¹ and the Vivid Girls¹ ŒHow to Have a XXX Sex
Life,¹ which have been synergistically, even joyously, promoted on Fox News
by willing  hosts like Rita Crosby and, needless to say, Mr. O¹Reilly.²

 

Rich also notes that ³None of this has prompted an uprising from the
red-state Fox News loyalists supposedly so preoccupied with Œmoral values.¹²
Of course none of these programs offer a positive view of pro-choice and
gay-lesbian rights, but still the willingness to tolerate adultery, open and
public sex, and de facto pornography is impressive. Of course these programs
are offered by a network that supports aggression, torture, official lies on
a grand scale (historically ³off-the-charts,² as Mark Crispin Miller points
out), a destruction of the welfare state, racism, and subversion of the U.S.
constitution,  with implied moral and political values that apparently
appeals to the loyalists.  The programs themselves watched by children
should help integrate them into a culture of  aggression, domination,
hierarchy and militarism.

 

The Pro-Death Constituency

 

There is a  substantial overlap between the folks who oppose abortion and
those who support capital punishment and perpetual war. Thus the
self-designation of  these people as ³pro-life² is  a  serious
misrepresentation‹they favor preserving the life of fetuses, but are in
favor of  a variety of policies that injure or terminate life once it
emerges from the womb. They could with rather more justice be called the
³pro-death² constituency as their preference is for protecting undeveloped
life still devoid of  personality, while they are less concerned with
protecting the lives of humans who are fully sensate and members of  the
human community. In fact, many of  them are positively eager to see mass
death imposed on people who stand in the way of their country¹s projection
of  power. 

 

Many of them are extremely fond of Sharon¹s Israel, recently in an
intensified phase of ethnic cleansing, busy  rendering life miserable and
killing large numbers of another set of non-Caucasians. Political
commentator Bill Berkowitz also calls attention to a current Christian
fundamentalist compassion deficit: ³Organizations which are amazingly quick
to organize to fight against same-sex marriage, a woman's right to choose,
and embryonic stem cell research are missing in action when it comes to
responding to the disaster in southern Asia. None of their web sites are
actively soliciting aid for the victims of the earthquake/tsunami.
http://www.workingforchange.com/printitem.cfm?itemid=18309

 

Thirty years ago I coauthored an article on ³Moral Consistency and the
Abortion Issue² (with Robert Edelstein and Mary Herman, Commonweal, March
22, 1974), in which we carried out  statistical significance tests on the
relation between voting on an extremely restrictive anti-abortion bill in
the Pennsylvania legislature and voting on a series of  bills that would
have (1) reinstituted capital punishment, (2) expressed opposition to the
Vietnam war, (3)  continued payments to welfare recipients, and (4)  eased
up on parole requirements for prisoners. The first two votes provide
measures of legislators¹ reactions to the direct termination of post-fetal
life. The other two are crude indicators of concern with human welfare. Our
statistical analysis of the votes of Pennsylvania legislators showed a
strongly significant correlation between votes for the anti-abortion bill
and  votes for reinstituting capital punishment and support for the Vietnam
War (and against easing parole requirements; there was no significant
relationship between anti-abortion and pro-welfare votes).

 

This article aroused strong emotions among some readers of Commonweal, but
the statistical findings were never challenged, and they point to a linkage
that is fairly obvious. It follows that there is no way the anti-abortion
crusaders can justifiably call themselves ³pro-life,² and when they and the
mainstream media use such terminology it should be assailed and corrected.

 

The New York Times and the Mrs. Jellyby Syndrome

 

The New York Times  has long  suffered from the Mrs. Jellyby Syndrome, a
disorder described by example in Charles Dickens¹ Bleak House, where Mrs.
Jellyby spends all of her time organizing efforts on behalf of the distant
natives of Booriaboola-gha, while paying no attention to the poor state of
her own family. Among many other illustrations, the Times displayed this
ailment at the time of the big Pittston strike back in 1989, when the paper
had no interest in this major home-grown struggle but paid devoted attention
to the simultaneous strike of  miners in the Soviet Union. (Of course, the
political basis of this differential attention was obvious: the Times is
anti-union, but has always been pleased to support union activism in distant
places where this is causing problems for target/enemy states. In the same
time frame as the Times was giving indignant support to the mistreatment of
Solidarity in Communist Poland, it was completely silent on the even more
brutal crackdown on unions in Turkey, a U.S. client state.)

 

Recently, the Times has devoted massive attention to protests in the Ukraine
and the deficiencies of  the voting process in that far-off land, including
the contradictory findings of  exit polls and official tabulations. In fact,
from November 1 through December 31, 2004, the paper had 118 articles on the
Ukraine and its election, with 17 running on the first page. Meanwhile,
protests in their own country  and election abuses here were of far less
interest and concern to the editors. There was a protest  of  an estimated
20,000 people at Fort Benning, Georgia, on November 19-21, against the
Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, long (and still
widely) known as the  School of the Americas,  and also widely known in
non-establishment sources and Latin America as the ³School for the
Assassins² given the great importance of  the school¹s trainees in the rise
of the National Security State, death squads, torture, and military
dictatorships in Latin America. (Two-thirds of the people named  as high
level killers by the UN-sponsored El Salvador Truth Commission had been
trained in the School of the Americas, and School trainees were leaders in
the overthrow of  democratic governments and instituting reigns of terror
throughout Latin America.) The New York Times did not even mention this
protest. 

 

There have also been innumerable protests and studies claiming that the
recent U.S. presidential election was stolen. In Ohio, for example, there
have been rallies at the state house, hearings, numerous law suits filed,
and a great many affidavits and testimonials to electoral abuses that in the
aggregate could easily have determined the election outcome. Ohio election
officials are resisting subpoenas and there is even evidence of corruption
in ongoing recounts (Democracy Week, ³Ohio Recount Steeped in Fraud²
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010205I.shtml). Congressman John Conyers has
held hearings on the abuses and has appealed to members of the Senate to
help postpone the Electoral College vote till matters are cleared up.

 

One participant in the protests, Gary Polvinale, writes that ³Ohio is
screaming the truth at the top of its lungs, literally, and no one hears us
because of all the noise of the media silence.²  He has a point.  The Times
has never mentioned that ³State officials have outsourced and privatized
America¹s voting system,² and that with 99.4 percent of votes under machine
control ³It¹s an open invitation to vote fraud with minimal chance of
discovery² (Lynn Landes).  The Times has not mentioned the Conyers hearings
in any news article, and in its 36 articles that refer to the question of
possible  electoral fraud in Ohio published between October 1 and December
31, none pull together the wide array of evidence and no editorial or
opinion piece calls for a full recount in Ohio and elsewhere and a
postponement of the Electoral College vote pending such inquiries, let alone
a new election (their one extensive article on the abuses, devoted strictly
to deflating the claims, fails even to mention electronic manipulation and
Republican control of  the machines and software: Tom Zeller, ³Vote Fraud
Theories, Spread by Blogs, Are Quickly Grounded,² NYT, Nov. 12, 2004).

 

 As in the case of the 2000 election theft, the Times is not about to
challenge an election result that pleases the business community and where a
challenge would cause rightwing frenzy. The Times has pointed out that in
the Ukraine the Supreme Court declared the voting abuses so severe as to
nullify the election, but the paper doesn¹t point out the irony that in this
country the Supreme Court has only thrown its weight into confirming
electoral abuses to permit their candidate to win (in 2000). In his
Concurring Opinion to the decision halting a vote recount in Florida,
Justice Scalia stressed that a failure to ³stay² the recount might cause
³irreparable harm²--to Bush! Imagine the U.S. media¹s reaction if the
Ukraine court had validated the first vote there on grounds that otherwise
there might have been ³irreparable harm² to Victor Yanukovich!  Abuses in an
election in the Ukraine are one thing‹the establishment as a whole is happy
to condemn that election and demand a rerun‹but for this country, when the
dominant party of property is on top, no thanks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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